Sri Sai Palace

Sri Sai Palace stands at the NICE Road junction near Kengeri, where the ring road meets Mysore Road. It is built on a scale that guests notice before anything else — one reviewer calls it a mini Bahubali set, which gives you the idea. The hall seats a thousand, with room for fifteen hundred moving through, and there are ten rooms on site for the two families.

The kitchen is vegetarian. You can use theirs or bring your own caterer, subject to their approval.

Dining inside and out

This is the thing reviewers single out, and they are right that it is rare. Most venues give you one dining arrangement and you work around it. Here there is both an indoor and an outdoor setup, which means a lunch in April and a dinner in December can each happen in the right place rather than the only place.

Easy to reach, but bring everything with you

Sitting on the NICE junction makes it unusually well connected — guests can come from almost any side of the city without crossing town, and the car park is large enough that nobody circles. The trade-off is that there is nothing around it. If someone forgets flowers, or a gift, or a packet of kumkum, there is no shop to nip to. Worth telling whoever is running your errands on the day.